Crash Bandicoot 4, a game with no online features, was unplayable when Blizzard's login servers went down

Crash Bandicoot gives some side-eye — (Image credit: Toys For Bob)

The PC version of Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time was released on March 26, exclusively on Battle.net. Though it features local multiplayer there's no online mode, so players were less than thrilled to discover it included always-online DRM, requiring authentication through Blizzard's login servers to play. They were even more unthrilled when those login servers went down yesterday, making Crash Bandicoot 4 unplayable.

Though the servers are back online now, reliance on a constant internet connection remains frustrating for anyone who has to put up with occasional dropouts and instability. Still, at least this will prevent people from pirating it—wait, I'm just receiving a note. Ah, the CrackWatch subreddit reports that a pirated version of Crash Bandicoot 4 has already been released into the wild.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.